Antigua: The Land of Fairies, Wizards and Heroes
by Denise Brown Ellis and Larry Ellis
My Blurb:
Take hunks, chunks, and nuggets of ideas from some of the best-selling and most beloved fantasy novels and movies of the past hundred years. Chop them up and reassemble them haphazardly. Throw in some cuckoo ideas of your own to counterbalance the clichés and tropes. Apply a liberal dose of exclamation marks-- and voilà! You have this book!
My Reaction:
(This was another reading assignment for the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back book club podcast. As such, it was a shared read-aloud with Donald.)
Well. What is there to say? Where can you even begin? Taken as a serious effort, this is not good. It borrows too heavily from better works, characters are cardboard cutouts, it's repetitive and poorly-paced, and there are errors, plot holes (in the thinnest plot imaginable), and way too many exclamation marks.
However, this is one of those books you simply can't judge against the same standard as a normal book, especially when you go into it knowing it's not a good book (by any stretch of the imagination). It was a lot of fun to read and dissect, even without taking the podcast into account. As much as it "borrows" blatantly steals from fantasy classics, it also occasionally throws a curve ball that you would never see coming, even if you were to spend hours guessing. And ultimately, it has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, which is more than I can say about many objectively better-written books I've read!
